I used to post my articles in the 'post' section of Wordpress. But now I learned that the tags URLs appear way higher in the search engines than the actual URL. Why is this happening? Can we prevent tag URLs to be indexed? Will it matter if I make a 'pages' post? I guess it may because pages do not have tags. Any clue? Thanks.
It depends on the nature of the content. This is a good read on the topic. If you install the All in One SEO plugin, you can noindex the tag URLs.
Thanks but it still is a puzzle for me why the tags URL ranks higher in the search engines. Will check the page.
Noindex, follow is the correct way to do it. Google will still have the page in its index, but it just won't be able to crawl any updates on that page if you block the tags through robots.txt. Google's algorithms likely picked up that the tag pages were more relevant because they contained the keywords that it expected for the query and that it was looked to more often than your key guide page(s). Just noindex, follow those pages and you should be fine.
As the tag url have your exact keywords & also in some cases the keyword density is quite high as compare to your specific page that is why it got indexed earlier. But you can use no index to get them away from SERPs.
I can use no index to get them away from SERPs but I am going to lose traffic b/c those URLs rank higher than the regular pages. That's what I am seeing happening.